After years of cancer-free post inspections and now feeling frisky again, I'd like to show up again.
Obviously lots of things happened? No more RO2 support due to RO2 staff moving over to rectal style in community relations (= lick the hole or swallow the output, another version of whip or candy)?

Well, whatever. The game still exists and even if nobody might actually play it, my overcome sickness had me rethink about life and how not to waste all the time on the job. I had a great family time and now I wanna be creative here.

So here's a link to fella german RO2 players' forum - you know the folks over there - and my WIP map Taman 1941, when Germans still were the advancing attackers. Included are historically accurate Marinefährpramen, the landing boats of the Wehrmacht in the area. When you click the link, you land in my WIP thread at PZDF clan and inside is another link to pictures of the beach area. Do not miss them.

After years of cancer-free post inspections and now feeling frisky again, I'd like to show up again.
Obviously lots of things happened? No more RO2 support due to RO2 staff moving over to rectal style in community relations (= lick the hole or swallow the output, another version of whip or candy)?

Well, whatever. The game still exists and even if nobody might actually play it, my overcome sickness had me rethink about life and how not to waste all the time on the job. I had a great family time and now I wanna be creative here.

So here's a link to fella german RO2 players' forum - you know the folks over there - and my WIP map Taman 1941, when Germans still were the advancing attackers. Included are historically accurate Marinefährpramen, the landing boats of the Wehrmacht in the area. When you click the link, you land in my WIP thread at PZDF clan and inside is another link to pictures of the beach area. Do not miss them.

Taman1941 is going to be another Territory Map, of which the first 4 objectives are already fit for gameplay .... in the editor. So far I can't get it to start in the game via console (loads, but ends up with a black screen and the ocean sound I used - ideas on this welcome).

The map contains some historically adequate detail like the Marinefährpramen, troop transport boats used by the Wehrmacht for short distance sea rides. The models sway in the ocean for a sense of realism, but they are not drivable.

The ocean itself is NOT a fluid surface actor, but a tesselated plane created in 3ds Max and then associated with a deforming material using Gerstner wave calculation. In simple English: the water plane does not simulate waves by normal map FX or something, but the plane has real wave deformations and turns fizzy at the beaches with smooth forth-back-motions.

I also created an underwater post-process effect, but as the bots trigger it on all teammates even outside the PP-volume, it is switched off for now.

Map comes along with daycycle, moving sun and sunset, moon and stars at night. The consequence is dynamic lights and shadows and thus we need well prepped GPUs here to maintain 60 fps.

Most of the foliage also moves dynamically within a perimeter around the player. At far distance, the landscape textures disappear in favor of monochrome colors to give a sense of color perspective. Watch one of the grand masters' classical landscape paintings and you'll see it there, too: Hills far away are blueish, mid distance rather green and in close area the share of red, resulting in brown soil colors increases.

The Wehrmacht mission: Secure the beaches (2 caps) under heavy counterfire, then move uphill over the cliff to a forest and clear a Soviet camp. Then follows a long road and free nature towards a lighthouse that will be accessible inside and up to the top (current WIP).

Perspectives are a village close to the lighthouse and on the way back past the bay there will be a town offering close building und sublevel canalization combat (not before the end of this year ... yeah, the map is way big).

The whole map is based on level streaming in a way, that all the area is sliced in equally sized squares, so parts unseen in certain stages during gameplay will stay unloaded for performance sake.

Is the map finished? No, not even beta. So what's the point offering access?

A small area of the map is already playable and I encourage fellow gamers to share their thoughts on what to include, in what directions the Wehrmacht should advance, etc.
Bugs & glitches? Don't hesitate to tell.

The files are on Steam Workshop now, consider the entries that show ROE and UPK respectively at the end of their label. A third entry is for mere description, the files behind it are corrupted. Do NOT subscribe that 3rd entry.

The already playable parts of the map terrain have been overhauled using vertex color blended multitexture materials. The lighthouse still needs polishing especially regarding its normal map components.
A wildwater river changing its water directions using flow map technology ist roughly finished, including cascades.

Current jobs:
- Underwater effect switch .... one bot runs under the water surface, all players get the effect. Very nasty.
- Paths on the landing boats are not satisfying
- landscape crafting towards the lighthouse.
- detail work on the wild water flow, esp. dealing with direction change artifacts

Not only do you conquer geographic areas when You capture objectives on the Taman peninsula. No, you also help comrades behind your back building supply infrastructure. One of these structures is the Taman-Crimea cableway for material transport, which will proceed towards completion with every objective your team gets. And you can watch it grow from a distance.

The first stage ist the arrival of vehicles and construction material at the engineers' camp, one of the objectives. As soon as it is captured, construction supplies, an Opel Blitz truck and a Kübelwagen will appear as a token of progress. I intend to have a complete cableway and moving trolleys on it.

For now, here's a first glance at the engineers' camp. Please ignore the placeholder material on the Blitz, which still needs some makeup on its face:

Sven;
So far this map is on the "adventurist" side. It looks real good .... just be careful with the FPS.

Indeed. In the non-visible background the map has been prepped thoroughly for level streaming. What does this mean?
It is not build on classic udk terrain but rather on square-shaped, 65535 faces big static meshes side by side on a 8 x 8 roster = 64 of those static meshes. Each one has a streaming volume of its own.
As soon as the map will be finished and optimized for streaming in a way that you can't see disappearing levels from areas crowded by players, FPS should be of minor concern. Currently, ALL levels are immediately streamed in and stay visible, hence there will be FPS drops on the test server.

Except for some special meshes like the big cliff rocks or the lighthouse that stay in persistent level due to their size any other mesh, emitter, material, sound, etc. is attributed to its terrain forming static mesh and therefore to its distinct level streaming volume.
Say, the woods with all those trees are out of sight, the level will be streamed out and all the actors on it will no longer cause any cost.

Of course, this streaming technique will need trial runs of its own as I don't want visible stream-ins and stream-outs.

I am off for a few days. The files on Steam Workshop will face a name change, hence the entries are hidden at the moment.
Reason: The spelling "TE_" rather than "TE-" seems to cause issues causing the map not to show up in the Workshop Map Browser ingame after successful download. The same is true for WebAdmin.

Renaming files in any UDK based environment is to be handled with care. I will leave a note as soon as the files are renamed, uploaded and made public again. I shall use the opportunity for the next map update.

Use the collection's one-click feature. Those of you who got the old "TE_" ROE-files: Erase "TE_Taman1941" folders, the new folders are named "TE-Taman1941". Any trouble? Be sure to empty the game's cache.

You can now open the map via the ingame workshop map browser and see it in WebAdmin.

Currently I am working on the level streaming. There is some trial and error involved thus I might alter some files over the next few days.

I suggest NOT to check out the map currently but to wait until the streaming setup is stable. The current version crashes the client after some heavy lag when the player attempts to pass over the cliff passageways as a consequence of the huge stream load.
I now change the streaming setup in a way that has all levels in RAM at game start already (be sure to have RAM on your box ), so the streaming volumes only affect visibility for performance reasons along with max draw distance settings, etc.

I have altered the level streaming system in a way that all stuff is loaded in the clients' memory at game start while the streaming volumes only control visibility. That works fine now. At the moment I dig into some detail work on the road shoulders to make them fit in the landscape more smoothly.
Some foliage work has been done and more streaming volumes will be added in order to better control foliage (dis-)appearance for fps sake.

My estimate is a working update on workshop and the test server in the middle of next week.

Within the next few days I shall upload the next stage of Taman. What changed?

Section 3_8 of the map has been subdivided into a cluster of 30 small strem levels in order to set up a dense forest. As you won't be able to to take a long view in such an environment, it makes sense to render distant areas invisible for the sake of fps. I tried the same thing using maxdrawdistance and stat_fps switched on but while the actors weren't drawn after trespassing the max distance line the fps didn't really drop while switching off the streaming volume resulted in immediate improvement. Anybody else who made that kind of an experience here?

Apart from the forest, the nearby pond got a hut, a pier and a boat. The village received another slightly damaged and accessible building, a truck, a car wreck and more roads.

A new player start for allies at the lighthouse and a new objective have been added.

Some more features might follow berfore I'll upload that next version.

Due to my engagement in town construction detail there will be a larger gap to the next update. The test server will not be updated either. My estimate for the next map update is january 2017.

What's going to happen? The street network including sidewalks is finished meanwhile. Now the sewer system will be linked to the street surface or, in some cases, to building cellars / basements. As we do have an invasion scenario, only part of the town will be wrecked after artillery impacts, the major part will appear intact with accessible buildings and quite some sniping sites. Due to building levels and sewer access the fight for cap zones won't be simply back and forth, but also up and down.
Expect lots of stuff beyond stock models and stock building elements.

The original terrain might be sort of refurbished with regard to road inclusion as I am not satisfied with the current result of simple modular elements there. In the end there will be more 3ds max tasks and less editor fumbling for the sake of neat results.

And, yes, congrats for the better presidential candidate. Glad the media hate campaign failed and those fake anti-hate preachers all showed their true faces. Do we see the end of PC bullshit here?

a few months without a sign passed by, so it's truly time for an update on the Taman town part. In the first place: Still lots of work ahead, as I want buildings accessible.

First glance pics:

Between the street tracks, terrain patches are yet to be added and the entrance shafts to the sewer network below are part of the To Do list too. In the final scenario the town will be partly destroyed. In terms of cap zones I intend to offer some freedom of choice to the attackers by offering 3 - 4 targets at once, that cannot be recaptured. Defenders need to spot and report Wehrmacht movements throughout the town.

Nothing spectacular, hence no images. I guess you guys don't wanna hear "another mile of sidewalks UV-mapped" or something. But that's the somewhat boring stuff that's going on right now.

The landscape has been altered in a way that it became rather flat. After my visit to Taman a softly warped surface covered by swampy areas and dry hills describes the image best. Steep cliffs to the strait of kertch.
My personal learning curve drove me to do most of the editing in 3ds max rather than the editor and import buildings and terrain afterwards.